10 New Startups To Help You Run a Better Event

In this post, you’ll find a list of the new movers and shakers in the event startup scene. All of them have one objective in mind: to make your event better!

Dozens of startups contact me every week to be featured on the blog. Satisfying them all is almost impossible. Hence why I decided to select the most innovative in a special roundup.

There are great new services in seating, social media, remote attendance, marketing and aggregation.

Enough with the chit chat, let’s take a look:

Epilogger

Epilogger is a an event archiving platform. Very similar to Eventifier, it features a cool interface that aggregates information about your event from the social web.

You can see an example from TechCrunch Disrupt:

Planana

The peculiarly named Planana is a ticketing and promotion dashboard for your event. While the ticketing is quite straightforward, the promotion service is quite interesting. Planana helps you set up a reward system based on discounts or VIP access in exchange for social actions such as tweets or likes.

There is also an interesting sponsors section where users can pick events to sponsor their website, a la Google Adwords. Very well thought.

BYO Booth

Other than having an awesomely designed website, BYO Booth is a photo boot platform based on Instagram. There is no actual booth needed though. You just need to set up an Instagram hashtag for your event and the software will look for attendees pictures. You can then decide to stream them on a slideshow, post them to Facebook or print them.

Nice, huh?

Here is how simple it is to set up:

BloodHound

Bloodhound is a new event app service. In what is becoming a crowded space where players such as EventMobi or Twoppy are doing great things, they are offering a nicely designed product to event organizers.

I particularly liked the custom landing page where attendees and exhibitors can download the free app. See it yourself:

Ex Ordo

Ex Ordo brings order to what is usually a web mess: academic conference papers management. Having worked myself with this side of the business I would start using Ex Ordo immediately. It allows allocated reviewers to vote for abstracts, thus making the papers management seamless.

Here is a nice little video that explains how it works:

SeatGeek

I must admit I am a bit late on SeatGeek. Mostly because the prime benefit is for attendees. The service allows ticket hunters to find the best ticket at the best price for your favorite gig. Or at least it promises to do that. It has gained a lot of interest in the startup scene as it really seems to work.

The opportunity here is for ticket brokers. In fact you can apply to become a verified broker and get listed on SeatGeek, instantly exposing your tickets to a large audience.

If you are a Justin Bieber fan, here is what buying on SeatGeek looks like. The best deals are in green, the websites selling them on the right:

Refynr

I’ve been meaning to cover Refynr for a while now. The platform empowers organizers to display live tweets on large screens as well as creating an interface for attendees to check or send tweets directly via Twitter login. You have moderation capabilities and rich media integration. It ticks all boxes.

Here is what a Refynr attendee page looks like:

Conferize

Conferize is very similar to Lanyrd, Plancast, Eventifier and the above Epilogger. With a conference focus and a remote attendance twist. I immediately noticed the emphasis on live streaming. This platform has really the potential to disrupt the conference industry, provided they manage to obtain as many livestreams as possible.

I can easily foresee a conversation where someone says “I couldn’t attend, I followed it on Conferize”. And that is quite powerful.

See an example for TechCrunch Disrupt (again):

Hubb.it

Hubb.it takes an interesting perspective on events. It wants to become the Tripadvisor for the industry where attendees can review, share tips, find accommodation or ask questions around a specific event. This comes with all the goods (influence on ticket purchase decision making process) and bads (what’s up with that negative review?) of the case. But it is a bold project and I like it.

Here is what an event page looks like:

That’s All Folks

I may have missed a few (or a lot) of other innovative services out there. Possibly because they are established or because I forgot about them. Use the contact section to let me know about your service and I’ll keep an eye on you for the next post.

In the meanwhile do these young guns a favor and share this post, it will make them (and me) happy.

Julius Solaris is the editor of EventManagerBlog.com, he is an international speaker and author of The Event App Bible, Engaging Events, Social Media for Events, The Good Event Registration Guide and The Annual Event Trends Report.

Thank you for including Ex Ordo among the game changers in this area. It is a really exciting time and we’re constantly working on making our vision a reality.
Give us a shout the next time you’ll be working with a conference, we’d be delighted to help!
All the best,
Tracy & all the team at Ex Ordo.

Thanks for featuring Planana! Our name might be peculiar but it’s memorable! We would like to offer anyone that mentions this blog free ticketing on our service, just send an email to me at fei@planana.com.

Awesome article!!! We’re planning a 5k race that’s being marketed to a college campus so social media is one of our biggest priorities. BYO Booth and Refynr really intrigued me. Nothing drives on site social media participation like a big screen everyone wants to get on.

Curious if you might know what pricing is like for Refynr and if BYO Booth slideshows are live streams of pics being uploaded to Instagram or if they’re just put together after.

Thanks so much for including Hubb.it Julius, we love what we are doing and it’s great to see what other tools we can use ourselves! We’d love to connect with the other start ups! give us a shout on the site or via email hello [at] hubb.it.